Tolerance cannot be measured in terms of degrees of intolerance. I am essentially opposed to burning books even when they incite others to violence. But freedom is either an absolute or it is conditioned on not inciting others to violence. Anything else is rationalized bigotry.

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Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Violence and Redemption in the Holy Land

We are hearing much about the third intifada as
lone Arabs attack Jews with knives and axes, and try to kill lots of people
with their cars. One Arab, frustrated by his inability to successfully play
human skittles leapt from his vehicle and proceeded to attempt to beat his chosen
victim with an iron bar before being subdued. Acts of violence and terror are
now a weekly occurrence and would be a daily occurrence if not for the
vigilance of the security services.

The debate on how to prevent violence (and
ultimately how to stop it completely) is heavily influenced by the extremists so
unless we have loud, clear and unequivocal guidance from our political,
religious and moral leaders the street will continue to rule; passions rather
than respect will govern our actions and the violence will escalate because
no-one is seen to effectively and consistently provide justice.

“If we really want to take an effective stand
against extremism, we should not obsess over the extremists; rather, we should
tackle those who facilitate, empower and legitimize extremism.” Providing a
Platform for Terror, Nov 29, 2012 by Sam Westrop

An example: The debate on “ownership” of the
city of Jerusalem has been magnified by the
Palestinian leadership, so that now, all residents of Jerusalem have been deemed settlers and
occupiers, and therefore, are justified as fair game… just like any modern
orthodox Jew (those wearing knitted kippot and tsitsiot over their jeans). But Jerusalem is the main battleground, lose that one and Haifa and Tel Aviv will
follow.

Who are the people facilitating, empowering and
legitimizing extremism?

After the murder of
the three Jewish seminarians in Judea and Samaria,
Fatah (of which President for Life Mahmoud Abbas is its leader) posted the
following threat (with
thanks to Isi Leibler):

“Sons of Zion,
this is an oath to the Lord of the Heavens: Prepare all the bags you can for your body parts. … We wish for the
blood to become rivers.”

That’s inciting the populace to
violence. The savage imagery portrayed cannot hint at even a glimmer of hope
for a peaceful future between neighbors.And yet this is a man in control of an entity that desires national
freedom, someone we have often been told is a ‘genuine’ partner for peace.

Intolerance does not need a reason, it simply
requires a target. The entire history of
Palestinian nationalism is predicated on the denial of legitimate Jewish
history, the renunciation of Jewish rights and the delegitimization of Jewish
sovereignty.Not drawing
attention to this nationally mandated bigotry legitimises it, on a global scale.

In 1955 Israel blithely dismissed the UN
with the words, famously uttered by Ben-Gurion
“oom shmoom” (the UN, so what?) That pithy phrase soon entered the Israeli
political lexicon. The contempt it expressed was deserved, nevertheless it was a
mistake to ignore the damage to Israel
that propaganda could cause, spread globally through the UN.Allowing others to write and re-write the
history books has done Israel
incalculable damage by helping Israel’s
enemies to spread their narrative into the global mainstream.

One example from the many corrupt UN agencies
will suffuse as the exemplar for
United Nations duplicity.The creation
of UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) was an act of conspiracy whose
intent was to guarantee a continuous war would be waged against Jewish
existence in Israel.The United Nations fashioned an organization
that was answerable only to itself, was self-perpetuating and whose foundation
document, applied to any nation other than Israel would have been deemed to be
blatantly illegal. UNRWAs raison d’être can only be interpreted as easing into
position the replacement of one population with another. Thus UNRWA legitimized
Arab colonialism and is, for as long as it remains in existence, an act of United
Nations sanctioned ethnic cleansing.

The struggle against the UN may be arduous as
well as costly to Israel but
it is a necessity for its survival and yet Israel has largely suffered in
silence rather than fighting it.

Israel’s founding political leaders were left-wing
and militantly secular, at least until the ascent of the right wing Likud party
to national leadership in 1977.Yet the
same political attitude has continued to govern Israel’s
elites since 1977 – it has meant that neither Left nor Right has addressed the
religious dimensions of the war between Israel
and its enemies, either internationally or internally within Israel.

Writing in Yedioth Aharonoth (an Israeli
newspaper) on 9th November 2014 Yoaz Hendel described the killing of an Arab
wielding a knife at police as resulting “from the national-religious conflict being waged.”

In any society in which a vacuum forms, people
with definite ideas will fill the emptiness that has been created. That vacuum
is an opportunity for views of what is right and what is wrong and of personal
continuity expressed through time and space. Our identity is layered. Europe is allegedly a post-nationalism entity and this is
where many of its problems lie.People
who feel that something is missing from their lives are susceptible to a
crippled interpretation of any process that can be explained to them with
simplicity.

While issues of identity are never simple - if
a person is born in a country they take on the identity of the country in which
they live, or they should. It is part of the basis for the social contract that
defines and enriches everyone living in a democracy. An Israeli may be a
Christian, Druze, Jew or Muslim. Their primary identity may be national (based
on their place of birth or election) or religious but Israel has
refused to engage in this debate. This has created a vacuum which allows the
extremists to dominate the ongoing debate amongst all Israelis.

A “big” problem in Israel is that the national anthem
clearly states Nefesh Yehudi (Jewish soul).This makes the Arabs feel like “outsiders” which they don’t like! I suspect
that a Nefesh Yisraeli (soul of Israel)
would be equally unacceptable however it may be the only answer that has broad national
backing, except to those who do not want a state called Israel.And those people who don’t want to live under
a Star of David (for a national flag)? There are 29 Christian nations that
include crosses in their national flag (including Britain
and Sweden).There are 17 Muslim nations with Islamic
symbols.The Palestinian Authority flag
is green, white, red and black. These are the classic colors of Islam, pan-Arab
imperialism and Ba’athist genocide.The
flag of Hamas is theocratic.

Arab identity is not based solely on ethnicity.It is religiously colonialist and brutally
intolerant of any minorities unfortunate enough to endure living beneath its
exercise of power.Palestinian
nationalism is inconsistent with Jewish self-determination. A person of Jewish
faith cannot be a Palestinian unless they are hostile to Zionism (which is
arguably the main aspect of Israeli identity).Palestinian nationalism has usually been antisemitic and it denies
Jewish Near-Eastern history while interpreting European Jewish history
unfavorably.This is nothing less than
a war to deny Jewish civilization.

And yet, over three generations Israel
has failed to attack this apartheid view of Arab-Palestinian exceptionalism
which refutes Muslim or Christian Israeli identity as bogus and worse, a
betrayal of the “Arab nation.” The nephew of an Arab member of parliament
called himself an Israeli Muslim in an internet video and as a consequence he was
forced to flee for his life - overseas. His aunt, the Member of Knesset Hanin
Zoabi, publicly attacked him.This is
also a marker for the extremists.It
tells them that violence against the individual is permissible.Most of the Arab leadership and its captive
intelligentsia terrorizes the populace into conforming to an anti-Zionist /
antisemitic narrative that denies them full integration into Israeli society.

Benjamin Netanyahu has refined the art of doing
nothing during three terms as Prime Minister.When he is forced to confront anything he is a populist leader so his
do-nothing approach encourages chaos. It is only at the breaking point that he
will choose the easiest route to placating the situation.This is his failure.It is his weakness as a leader.

It will damn him in any future written history
about Israel because the
issue of identity is even more important than whether or not the current leader
of the Palestinians is inclined towards making peace with Israel.Peace will not be achieved while a large
fifth column lives in Israel,
one that refuses to acknowledge the equal rights of the Jewish majority.
Paradoxically, the equal rights of the Arab minority are undermined by the fear
of that fifth column.

In the 1960’s and 1970’s British television
tackled the issue of discrimination and prejudice with the sitcom “Till Death
us do Part.”Its American equivalent
“All in the Family” ran for most of the 1970’s.Israel
desperately needs something similar to re-educate its people.

Kurt Tucholsky (a journalist and social
commentator) labelled World War I a “worldwide latrine filled with blood,
barbed wire, and hate songs.”For Israel (and
Jews elsewhere), if the world is to not become another latrine filled with
blood and hate songs it needs to de-escalate the passions that are being
expressed everywhere in strident and apocalyptic terms.For that to happen Israel, for one, needs a firm and
guiding hand at the helm of government. Novelist Amos Oz believes the
Israel-Palestine conundrum is a battle between extremists and pragmatists - on
both sides. Only when the extremists are all but silenced will there be a
chance for peace between Israel
and Palestine.
In a normal society guidance would come from the clergy and then from
government but in Israel
because of its secular history that clerical guidance is absent or mostly
confrontational. So leadership must begin with the government providing a
vision for how it can unify the nation and marginalize those people or groups
who are working to keep the nation divided.

Barry Rubin (Israeli columnist and professor)
said “The Palestinians’ leaders have long
believed that an intransigent strategy coupled with some outside force—Nazi Germany, the USSR,
weaning the West away from Israel—will
miraculously grant them total victory. They aren’t going to change course now that
that route leads not forward but in circles.”

That same Arab-Palestinian strategy is fought
in the Western World usually far more subtly than the naked racism and
religious bigotry that is expressed within the Muslim world nevertheless things
will get worse, everywhere, because the fascist nature of identity politics is again
reasserting itself in western social discourse.

Fascism is the tyranny of the few against an
even smaller group in order to proscribe that groups equal exercise of human
rights and ultimately, by eliminating their equal rights, to exclude that
target group.

Israel is the victim of fascism in the UN
and that fascism is spilling over into Western society. Jews are once more becoming
victims. How often have we engaged in
peaceful protest, only to be confronted with intimidation and violence? These
twin tactics are the fascists preferred tools of persuasion. In the boycott
movement and in academia such methods as these are viewed as the acceptable demonstration
of their right to freedom of expression. Our right to not live in fear is inevitably
dismissed as the suppression of our enemies own right to protest.In Weimar Germany
the Nazis used the same tactics that the Left and their Muslim allies now use
to undermine our democratic rights.

Here’s the thing.The Palestinians have their identity. It is
1,400 years old, tribal and hierarchical. It is racist, misogynistic,
xenophobic and antisemitic.It is Arab
history being fiendishly re-enacted today in Iraq
and Syria.

Israeli identity is still in the mix. It is
still under development. It is 66 years old (1948), it is 97 years old (1917)
and it is 4,000 years old.It is defined
by the period of the Bible, by the Second World War, by 1948, 1967, 1973 and
1979 (the War of Independence, the 6 Day War, the Yom Kippur War and the Peace
Treaty with Egypt).Judaism and Israel began in history some time
between 2,600 and 2,100 years before the Prophet Muhammad got his big idea.

Arab identity as expressed in jingoistic
circles is based on disrespecting ones enemy. Pan-Arabism has an intellectual history
in the 20th Century that is wholly triumphalist. All opponents are ‘the enemy’
– remember the recent picture of the Arab women showing her shoe to ‘the Jew’?In Arab culture the shoe directed towards a
persons face says “you are beneath me, I trample on you”. It is a telling symbol of Arab cultural
attitudes that it finds no opposition in Arab society.

With age comes wisdom (in theory). Respect is
earned by intentional humanity that is endowed unconditionally.It is a concept that Arab identity denies to
us and to everyone who is not them. It is their greatest strength but also the
root of their greatest threat to us.

Israel, for its own sake as well as for
the sake of the Diaspora, must understand the consequences of failed
leadership, of its inability to create a credible consensus.Finding a way to express our rights in our
sovereign homeland that is inclusive for all of Israel’s citizens must be a
priority.Only then will peace be possible.